Is there a way to prevent Google Alerts from picking up old press releases?

[IdeaGarden]

I have a client that wants a lot of old press releases (pdfs) added to their news page, but they don't want these to show up in Google Alerts. Is there a way for me to prevent this?

[CleverPhD]

Robots.txt and exclude those files.  Note that this takes them out of the web index in general so they will not show up in searches.

You need to ask your client why they are putting things on the web if they do not want them to be found.  If they do not want them found, dont put them up on the web.

[IdeaGarden]

That was what I was thinking would have to be done... It's a little complicated on why they don't want them showing up in Alerts. They do want them showing up on the web, just not as an Alert. I'll let them know they can't have it both ways!

[KeriMorgret]

That also presumes Google Alerts is anything near accurate. I've had it come up with things that have been on the web for years and for whatever reason, Google thinks they are new.

[nbeske]

The easiest thing to do in this situation would be to add negative keywords or advanced operators to your google alert that prevent the new pages from triggering the alert. You can do this be adding advanced operators that exclude an exact match phrase, a file type, the clients domain or just a specific directory. If all the new pdf files will be in the same directory or share a common url structure you can exclude using the "inurl:-" operator.

[CleverPhD]

Well that is how to exclude them from an alert that they setup, but I think they are talking about anyone who would setup an alert that might find the PDFs.

One other idea I had, that I think may help.  If you setup the PDFs as images vs text then it would be harder for Google to "read" the PDFs and therefore not catalog them properly for the alert, but then this would have the same net effect of not having the PDFs in the index at all.

Danielle, my other question would be - why do they give a crap about Google Alerts specifically.  There has been all kinds of issues with the service and if someone is really interested in finding out info on the company, there are other ways to monitor a website than Google Alerts.  I used to use services that simply monitor a page (say the news release page) and lets me know when it is updated, this was often faster than Google Alerts and I would find stuff on a page before others who did only use Google Alerts.  I think they are being kind of myopic about the whole approach and that blocking for Google Alerts may not help them as much as they think.  Way more people simply search on Google vs using Alerts.

[KeriMorgret]

Harder, but certainly not impossible. I had Google Alerts come up on scanned PDF copies of newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s that were images.

The files recently moved and aren't showing up for the query, but I did see something else interesting. When I went to view one of the newsletters (https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2S0WP3ixBdTVWg3RmFadF91ek0/edit?pli=1), it said "extracting text" for a few moments, then had a search box where I could search the document. On the fly, Google was doing OCR work and seemed decently accurate in the couple of tests I had done. There's a whole bunch of these newsletters at http://www.modelwarshipcombat.com/howto.shtml#hullbusters if you want to mess around with it at all.

[CleverPhD]

Thanks for the post Keri.

Yep, the OCR option would still make the image option for hiding "moo"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLwYpSCrlHU